DEAR WINKLEVII: Give It Up, You Already Won, Now Move On

The Winklevoss twins' irrational crusade against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is not over.

The twins plan to double down on their fight in 2011, willing to risk throwing away the $65 million settlement they received in 2004 (which is now worth $100+ million).

The settlement was $20 million in cash, and $45 million in stock. The twins say Facebook deceived them about the value of the stock, thus giving them too few shares. They want to go to court to get the proper valuation on the stock.

To do so, they have to scrap the original settlement, and take a chance at getting a better payout.

Why are they still fighting this fight? Over the ridiculous idea of "principle."

"The principle is that they didn’t fight fair," Tyler Winklevoss tells the New York Times. He adds, "The principle is that Mark stole the idea."

That's B.S.

It's also hypocritical.

The Winklevosses voluntarily signed the settlement agreement, and Facebook's success has made them centi-millionaires. Now they want more. So they want to revoke the settlement agreement they voluntarily signed -- and, in so doing, go back on their word.

So the Winklevosses only fall back on "principle" when it suits them.

The truth of the matter is this is all about money. And thanks to Facebook's success, the Winklevosses have already gotten vastly more than they deserve.

The Winklevii say the $40 million in stock they received should be worth $500 million today, but Facebook gave them a bogus valuation in the 2004 settlement.

Remarkably, the Winklevosses still appear to think that everything that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have achieved is because of them. This is beyond delusional. It's megalo-maniacal.

These are Harvard graduates and Olympic athletes we're talking about. And they're wasting their lives trying to claim credit for something they had next to nothing to do with.

As the 9,000 Groupon clones, and hundreds of Facebook clones have demonstrated, ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It's execution that counts. Mark Zuckerberg executed. The Winklevosses didn't. And they've already been paid $120 milion for their failure, which is more than the vast majority of entrepreneurs will ever get.

Does anyone on this planet think the Winklevosses could have gotten a $120 million exit for their idea, ConnectU, if they had run it instead of Mark Zuckerberg?

The answer to that question, apparently, is "yes." There are two people that think that: Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

They tell the Times Zuckerberg has done little more than "not screwing up" Facebook. They "absolutely" think they could have made ConnectU into Facebook with hundreds of millions of users.

What an arrogant, silly, statement.

As Mark Zuckerberg's character in The Social Network says to Winklevoss characters, "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook you'd have invented Facebook."

If the Winklevosses had had any of Mark Zuckerberg's talent or vision, they could have built ConnectU into a beast that killed Facebook. After all, Facebook only had a slight head start.